That statement up there in the headline, that Flowboard will be “the most important free app you download this month” — that’s kind of a bold thing to say.

But it’s not hyperbole; Flowboard’s publishing tools are super-easy to use, letting you easily create electronic portfolios and presentations — heck, even magazines and eBooks — and the finished products, published on Flowboard’s site, are just as easy to share and view.

And if you rarely download anything, well, this may be the most important free app you download all year.

If you’re not feeling especially creative, Flowboard has 13 different templates to kick things off: presentations, catalogs, eBooks, photo albums, portfolios and even school reports can all be simply plugged in to one of the templates. If you to build a publication from scratch, that’s fine too.

When you’re done, you simply save your creation to Flowboard’s servers where a link to its Flowboard url can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter, and viewed by anyone through a web browser.

If anyone tries to view the link on an iPad, they’ll be prompted to download the app from the App store, after which the whole publication will be downloaded to their iPad, making it viewable even without an internet connection — just like an eBook.

Flowboard even gives publishers the ability to nest interactive links within text and images.

Now here’s the fine print: You’re only allowed 250 MB of space on Flowboard’s servers each month. If you’re publishing a lot of image-heavy stuff, you may want to pop for the $5 Premium upgrade, which quadruples your allowance to 1 GB. But this should only affect industrial-strength users employing Flowboard for commercial-ish uses. Most of us won’t need to pay anything.

Yes, there are countless other ways to share pictures and words with others — but Flowboard is among the most elegant, easy and flexible method to date. We’re excited.

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About the author

When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path — which explains why he's Cult of Mac's test editor-at-large. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of Wired.com and BIKE Magazine, among others. Hang with him on Twitter.

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